The Burning Plain Critic Reviews
Metascore®:
Based upon 9 Critic ReviewsHighest Rated
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Powerful, profound and beautifully rendered.Read the full review
The best performance here comes from a Mexican child actress, Tessa Ia, as half of one of the fraught mother-daughter relationships.Read the full review
Told chronologically, it might have accumulated considerable power. Told as a labyrinthine tangle of intercut timelines and locations, it is a frustrating exercise in self-indulgence by writer-director Guillermo Arriaga.Read the full review
Many of the weaknesses and few of the strengths of Guillermo Arriaga as a scripter are evident in his directing debut, The Burning Plain.Read the full review
The main drawbacks of The Burning Plain are its intentionally coy narrative and a zero-hour revelation that's ill-thought-out and generates some pretty chintzy psychobabble. It's the wobbliest element in an admirable, complex and frustrating movie.Read the full review
An ambitious, visually handsome production which fails to ignite.Read the full review
The characters in The Burning Plain are so narrowly defined by tragedy that they reveal no other facets of humanity.Read the full review
The scenery (prettily captured by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit) is littered with heavy symbolism (fire! rain! dead birds!); the performances are merely heavy.Read the full review
Like his scripts for “21 Grams” and “Babel,” this one makes heavy use of happenstance and temporal displacement, and like them, too, it depends on ideas about human behavior that can only be called preposterous.Read the full review
